‘Jews and other foreigners’

Manchester and the rescue of the victims of European fascism, 1933–1940

Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.

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Book

Publication History:

This book provides an account of the University of Manchester's struggle to meet the government's demands for the rapid expansion of higher education in the 1950s and the 1960s. It looks at the University's ambitious building programme: the controversial attempts to reform its constitution and improve its communications amid demands for greater democracy in the workplace, the struggle to retain its old pre-eminence in a competitive world where new ‘green field’ universities were rivalling older civic institutions. The book tells the story, not just from the point of view of administrators and academics, but also from those of students and support staff (such as secretaries, technicians and engineers). It not only uses official records, but also student newspapers, political pamphlets and reminiscences collected through interviews.

Book

Publication History:

This book provides a detailed consideration of the history of racing in British culture and society, and explores the cultural world of racing during the interwar years. The book shows how racing gave pleasure even to the supposedly respectable middle classes and gave some working-class groups hope and consolation during economically difficult times. Regular attendance and increased spending on betting were found across class and generation, and women too were keen participants. Enjoyed by the royal family and controlled by the Jockey Club and National Hunt Committee, racing's visible emphasis on rank and status helped defend hierarchy and gentlemanly amateurism, and provided support for more conservative British attitudes. The mass media provided a cumulative cultural validation of racing, helping define national and regional identity, and encouraging the affluent consumption of sporting experience and a frank enjoyment of betting. The broader cultural approach of the first half of the book is followed by an exploration if the internal culture of racing itself.

The trial in history, volume II

Book

Publication History:

Lawyers had been producing reports of trials and appellate proceedings in order
to understand the law and practices of the Westminster courts since the Middle
Ages, and printed reports had appeared in the late fifteenth century. This book
considers trials in the regular English criminal courts in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. It also considers the contribution of criminal lawyers in
developing the modern rules of evidence. The book explores the influence of
scientific and pseudoscientific knowledge on Victorian insanity trials and
trials for homosexual offences, respectively. The British Trials Collection
contains the only readily accessible and near-verbatim accounts of civil trials
from the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s, decades crucial to understanding how the rules
of evidence developed. It might be thought that Defence of the Realm Acts (DORA)
or its regulations would have introduced trials in camera. The book presents a
comparative critique of war crimes trials before the International Military
Tribunals at Nuremberg and Tokyo and the International Tribunals for the former
Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. The first spy trial by court martial after the legal
change in 1915 was that of Robert Rosenthal, who was German. The book also
considers the principal features of the first war crimes trial of the
twenty-first century in terms of personnel and procedures, the alleged crimes,
and issues of legality and legitimacy. It also speculates on the narratives or
non-narratives of the trial and how these may impact on the professed aims and
objectives of the litigation.